Re: #136, #138
The other thing to note is that, when staying home in the US, general crime is now much lower than it was in the 1970s-1990s. So people of parent-of-high-school-or-college-student age should not mistake the days of their youth as being “safer” from crime (terrorism or otherwise) compared to today.
However, the perception of crime is greater among many is partially due to the greater hype generated by the 24/7 newscycle of cable news and moreso…internet news sites which IME can release breaking news as much as a day ahead of the TV/print newsmedia.
The information overload and negative perceptions from all this coverage is a magnitude greater than it was 20-30 years ago when cable access wasn’t as commonplace, cable news networks not as prevalent, and the internet didn’t exist or wasn’t as commonly available as it is now.
@soccerguy315 thank you for the links. Nice detailed background.
What I was looking for was something more recent in the past 5-6 years. There must have been destabilizing event(s) to fascilitate their rise. And how did the West miss them while they were building a natio? It’s hardly under the radar.
We have been receiving warnings and outright travel bans to certain countries in Europe over the last year. Five were on the list in November 2015. Three currently on the list. If you are going to travel, travel smart and keep a low profile! Things have changed IMMENSELY in Central Europe over the last year.
Actually, I do remember feeling really vulnerable or scared sometimes when taking mass transit in those days. As I said, I’m a pathological worrier…doesn’t stop me from doing what I want to do, but boy can I ever worry.
Those statistics are only for transport systems. Daesh seems to be encouraging targets anywhere and everywhere with the theory being that the less predictable it is, the more terror it will cause.
We seem to have had a nice lull in Europe with relative peace in Spain, Ireland, London, and Greece for several years and now this. It was all too easy to get used to the peace. Time to vacation in oh, maybe New Zealand. Looks lovely there!
They’ll get you how they want to get you. Remember the Paris attacks included a music hall and a restaurant row. I think it’s a fool’s errand to think that there are magically safe places, sadly.
But any day I could go to downtown Chicago (or fill in any other American city) and there could be an attack of some sort. San Bernadino isn’t exactly a bustling metropolis.
edit:
Did you read that there was one young man who was at the Boston attacks, the Paris attack and now the Brussels attack? That is really bad luck.
One cited factor for the rise and rapid military and organizational successes of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, disgruntled former military officers who were left unemployed after the disbanding of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army during OIF:
http://time.com/3900753/isis-iraq-syria-army-united-states-military/
Incidentally, many of the top leadership of ISIS spent held by US military authorities before being released:
^Or awesome survivor skills. Legend has it that he has Chuck Norris blood in him, and that he might be related to Indiana Jones.
“One cited factor for the rise and rapid military and organizational successes of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, disgruntled former military officers who were left unemployed after the disbanding of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army during OIF”
Big factor and another huge foreign policy blunder by the administration after Bagdad fell.
…not if the whole civilized world is on the suicide mission…and, unfortunately, while nobody would admit, the actions of ALL nations are the proof that they are in fact on the suicide mission…and the USA is just a sitting duck…yes, one aspect of our suicidal tendencies is to blame some “disgruntled and unemployed”…it is very useful, it will definitely protect us in a future, more so if we keep in mind that those “disgruntled and unemployed” are simply laughing at us and dance when they kill more of us…
“Really? The police no longer need a warrant to enter my home? Or a subpoena issued by a judge to open my iPhone? There is no danger to the 4th Amendment.”
@TatinG
This is a classic strawman argument, in that you are arguing something no one was arguing. First of all, if a cop has probably cause to think a crime is being committed or a safety issue is present, they can enter your home under probable cause. If you had pot plants in your front window under a grow light, they could enter without a warrant, because it was visible. And yes, the FBI did get a warrant (in this case)…but if they have a method to break into any phone, which many accounts say the FBI was looking for, what about the next time?
And yes, to live in society, you give up certain rights of privacy,but there is a little thing in our society that when rights are turned over, they are for a reason. For example, we have driver’s licenses to make sure in some way people know how to drive and that we can take away that privilege if someone drives badly. We have license tags on our car so we can make sure the car is being maintained properly and that we can track it if it is doing something wrong. We turn over personal information to the government because we have a tax system that requires identification (on the other hand, the SS# was used in ways it was not supposed to be use, it has become the default id for most Americans, which was not supposed to happen).
However, that doesn’t change the points people were making about the Patriot act. In terms of the Apple case, people were looking beyond this particular case. So what if the FBI got apple to crack the password stuff on this Iphone, what if that was a general way to crack any Iphone, and then the FBI used that technology without a warrant. The terms of the Patriot Act as agreed to by our representatives was that the information gathered, because they didn’t have a warrant, was only to be used for cases of imminent terrorist threat (in a sense, the Patriot act allowed warrantless intercepts on the same grounds as probable cause , of imminent danger, of getting as much warning of a terrorist attack as possible.It was not to be used for law enforcement searching for non terrorist based crimes, and that is where the 4th amendment comes in. Under the warrant laws, unless a cop has probably cause, he/she cannot go into your home on a fishing expedition, they cannot get a broad based warrant that says “we want to search the home for evidence of crimes unspecified”, they have to specify what they are looking for, why, and it has to be a search where the thing possibly could be. If the warrant said car theft, they couldn’t look in the kitchen, and if they did that, even if they found a pound of cocaine in a kitchen drawer, it would be invalid, since they weren’t searching for drugs.
Using Patriot act wiretaps is like listening in on your telephone conversations without a warrant, like tapping your land line or internet connection, it is a fishing expedition with no check and balance. Libertarian conservatives and people like Leahy of Vermont absolutely refused to have any language in the bill allowing criminal activity found by this to be used in court and rightfully so, despite the urging of Dick Cheney and other “law and order” types.
Comparing the Patriot Act to the Nazis is ridiculous, and no one should be doing that, but comparing it for potential abuses is perfectly valid, we have had enough examples of how this kind of stuff can be used and abused. Hoover did it to stay in power for far too many years, the CIA used it against civil rights groups in this country, the justice department and the executive branch used wiretap capability for political reasons. The Patriot Act was drafted to protect against terrorism, it was limited focus and was agreed to based on that, but as Snowden and recent revelations show, law enforcement has been asking for that data to search through, and they know damn well it is illegal, because they also have all these ‘parallel construction’ techniques to try and show how they knew about a criminal act because they can’t say it came from data without a warrant. Like others have been saying, fascists and tyrants have used the fear of people to enhance their power since we had governments or authority in a group, and using ‘public safety’ to enhance their power is the oldest trick in the book. The US has come close at times to this kind of things, the Alien and Sedition acts come to mind, the suspension of Habeus Corpus during the Civil War (which the court ruled was legal, since Congress gave Lincoln that right, but still), it happened during the 1920’s with the Palmer raids and various ‘undesirable alien’ acts, it happened during the McCarthy Era, where the “Red Scare” was used to suppress all kinds of things, it happened in the 1960’s where race riots and the unrest over the war was used to justify all kinds of spying and illegal surveillance.
@Iglooo The precipitating event for the rise of ISIS was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As long as you asked …
“If so, while we scream outrage, we should also hold world governments responsible for their lack of for/oversight.”
How, precisely, should we “hold them responsible”? How do we enforce that? All ears to hear your solution.
Staying informed for a starter. Focusing on the terrorists alone is not productive. We get enraged at terroists and the policy makers get off free. The prison in Iraq sounds like an incubator for ISIS. That shouldn’t have been hard to see what that meant down the road. Even after they organized and started grabbing land, no one really blocked them.
@hayden While I believe your guy, that misses the point, which is that they could be. For all we know, someone is rummaging through my entire online life, or yours, right this very minute – without probable cause and without our ever knowing about it. I think that’s the problem that people have with the “Patriot” Act, constitutionally speaking.
You mentioned a firm – a private firm? I think farming this sensitive citizen information out to private firms only adds another layer of bad possibilities to this.
There was indeed a new alert!
There was just also an ongoing alert for Europe as well 
edit to add: US European Command has banned DOD personnel from traveling to Brussels and to Turkey until further notice.